Exclusive: Army of the Dead, Sucker Punch, Heavy Metal Updates

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Zack Snyder gives us all the deets on his upcoming slate.

By Scott Collura & Eric Moro

IGN Movies caught up with Watchmen and 300 director Zack Snyder yesterday while he was promoting his upcoming director's cut of the former, so of course we had to grab him for a minute and ask about his slate of upcoming projects. Here's the info that we gathered…

Army of the Dead first came up about two years ago, and was described at that time as "a zombie action-thriller which will be based on an original story by Snyder. He is reportedly producing the flick with wife Deborah Snyder." That and an updated version of the animated classic Heavy Metal have been two of the filmmaker's more anticipated projects, but he says that things aren't moving terribly fast on either front.

"Army of the Dead and Heavy Metal are in development still. We don't have any set shoot dates or anything like that," he told us, though of course we all know that his next film is going to be Sucker Punch anyway. "We're going to Canada in the beginning of July and the girls are training now [for that]. Art department is up and we're shooting, basically. So that movie is full-on.

"And then Guardians of Ga'Hoole is the other movie that's full-on," continues the helmer. Guardians is his other animated film besides Heavy Metal, only this one is based on the children's fantasy book series about owls. "I've been working on it for almost a year and a half. It'll be two years, actually, when I get to shooting. I was working on it when I went to do Watchmen. We had our first meeting up in Canada. But that's how animated movies are."

Snyder says that it was intimidating at first to dive into animation, especially since he didn't know "what the heck" was going on in the beginning.

"But the cool thing that [visual effects company] Animal Logic has done is they brought me on because they wanted me to just treat it like a movie," he says. "So the lensing, and the way I shoot it and the way I talk about how to make it, I use my terminology. I'm always like, 'We should have this on a 1-3 and a really skinny F-stop so that the focus is really short.' And that's an animated movie, so when they're doing layout they put those... and I have a lens package that I created. So they're really strict at the way they visualize it just like we'd be when we shoot a movie so that it feels a lot more like a movie. It's really been fun. And I think that when you start to see what we've created it's really going to be something cool."

Stay tuned to IGN Movies for more news from the world of Zack Snyder as it breaks.